Intrusive, maybe, but a dark pattern is 'deceit by design' whereas what you're describing seems to me 'being slightly annoying by design', which is a totally different thing.
Thinking about Exit Intent and how to optimize for it is a fairly well established part of online eCommerce. I think you made the wrong choice and your boss was probably right to be annoyed with you. It's within their prerogative to decide what user experience they offer to their users. And obviously, it's also yours to quit, but if you do so based on a poor understanding of what a dark pattern is, you're just hindering yourself.
Just because something is institutionalized doesn't mean it's right. Especially when that institution is eCommerce, one of the most manipulative industries in software.
I would ammend your description of dark patterns to "Deciept and manipulation by design" to see this through the lens most people do.
Just because something is "a fairly well established part of online eCommerce" doesn't mean it is not a shitty thing to do.
Second - I didn't say it's not shitty.
I wouldn't normally nit pick on terms but this is a conversation about words and their definitions.
Dark Patterns are a deliberate attempt to defraud or deceive through the use of UI.
There are many things that are shitty - country music for one - that are not dark patterns.
Just because you and I both don't like exit intent popups, doesn't make them something that should be criminalised.
Dark Patterns describe activity that either is or should be criminal. The difference is enormous.
This should not be possible, it's a horrible jarring experience every time it happens to me when I click a questionable link and try to go back to the previous page.
Sadly it works too often in relationships as well as ecommerce.
Spoiler: no change is forthcoming.
This is not a totally different thing. Both are examples of coercive/deceptive behavior. That makes them the same sort of thing, but differing by degree.
We'll call it shitty pattern if you dislike dark pattern.
I expect that they refused to implement it because it was a practice they felt was bad ethically rather than because it matched some industry definition.
There's no need for this kind of preface to your comment; you seem to have substantive points to discuss. Please refer to the HN guidelines:
>" When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." "
a) What if it was two confirmation popups before you had to leave the page?
b) Three confirmation popups?
c) What if it let you navigate away for about 10 seconds, but then immediately reloaded the last Luxottica page you were on. It only does this once.
d) What if it let you navigate away for about 10 seconds, but then immediately reloaded the last Luxottica page you were on. It does this 2-3 times before it stops redirecting you back and lets you browse freely again.
e) What if it required you to complete a short 5-30 second interactive engagement advertisement-game activity popup before you could leave instead of just clicking "OK I really want to leave".
f) What if it never let you leave unless you quit the browser but you could open other tabs.
g) What if it controlled your browser in such a way that you couldn't quit the browser, and it maximized the window. You can still put other windows on top of it but when you close them, the luxottica store is behind everything until you shut down the whole computer.
h) What if it loaded that page which you can't close every time you started the browser. Only reinstalling the browser makes this stop, until you visit the Luxottica website again and it reloads this functionality again.
i) What if it automatically loaded this page as your desktop background and required downloading a special tool from GitHub to get rid of it.
j) What if it automatically rebranded your entire computer to display Gucci logos throughout the UI. Reinstalling the operating system is the only way to fix it.
Your question is about what's acceptable. My answer is:
1. If the site tricks me (makes me take an action that I would not have taken if the site had not misled me), that's unacceptable. So, roughly any degree of deceit is unacceptable to me.
2. If the site stops me from switching/closing tabs, or changes system settings (like the ones you describe) without me being cognizant of agreeing, that's unacceptable.
Showing 3 popups within a tab when I'm about to close it: that's annoying and douchy, and probably won't work on me, but I won't hate you for it.
From your list, c-j would definitely make me hate you. a and b might be OK if you're presenting me better offers (e.g. 10% off the first time, then 15%, finally 20% off the third time).
That would be harassment. Not even borderline. How would you react if it were to happen on a physical shop?
If the alert says something untrue or misleading (last day of sale, virus on computer, 1000th visitor) that's deceitful.
Plus, it incentivizes having to threaten to cancel a deal to get anywhere near acceptable terms. Fuck that.
But basically off the page as regards to the specific UX patterns under discussion in this thread.
This one:
"when someone tried to leave the site, bring up a popup to offer them a deal or otherwise encourage them not to leave"
In other words: in the Venn diagram of the two buckets - the measure of overlap is quite small.
That's insane behavior, I don't owe your business or site anything, least of all my time. Those are the kindest words I can find for that behavior.
That'd depend on the implementation behavior. If it's using window.onbeforeunload, yeah I guess it's kind of like someone blocking you when you try to leave, although you can easily walk around them (on most browsers if you try to close the tab and the modal shows up, and you try to close the tab again it will override the modal). However, there's also another type where it tracks the location of your cursor, and shows a popup when it leaves the content area (indicating that your mouse is going to close the tab or go back). In that case it's not really blocking anything, and much more analogous to a salesperson saying "before you go" as you're walking out the door.
Which is a solid ‘no thanks, not coming here again’ from me.
I would try to avoid going back to that store.
It’s annoying and tacky but it’s not analogous to being held hostage.
Many stores do indeed make it hard to leave without buying, for example by having no direct route to the exit: you have to squeeze through the tills awkwardly. It's probably in the name of loss prevention, but it's also a disincentive to leave without a purchase.
Actually, nearly everything about a supermarket is carefully designed for extracting money from you, from product placement, to layout, need to have a loyalty card to access discounts, even perhaps having discounts in the first place (as opposed to selling at a lower regular price), multipacks driving food and packaging waste, etc etc etc.
well the difference is that you've used more fancy words in the second description. Reminds me of the joke
"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."
If a customer is attempting to leave and you bar their exit, you've demonstrated a willful contempt of their wishes. It causes the customer stress and serves no purpose other than to show them that you can make them do as you please. It's a micro aggression, a type of violence.
Imagine a woman trying to leave a man's apartment as he holds the door closed. He reminds her she was the one who came inside and asks again, is she sure there's nothing she wants from him? He keeps his hand there until she says she's sure so she understands, he [i]let[/i] her leave.
I'm against either scenario for effectively the same reasons.
You mean don't ultimately prevent you. But they absolutely do temporarily stop you.
For each one of those "No"s there are probably so many half-hearted and exasperated "Ok"'s. In aggregate we get to the point we're at, one little water droplet at a time. I'm optimistic though, because the same force works the other way too.
Has anyone experienced this obnoxious browser history hijacking in Chrome? How do they pull this off and how can we report it so it stops being exploited?
I fully agree with you here and if i could leave every site that did this I would be happier, but there are a couple that do this that I have little choice but to interact with:
- a hardware components website, pretty much the only good one in the UK that will ship individual parts, if you even move your mouse point towards the top right corner (this is also where the basket and login buttons live) up comes the model "Please don't leave" in big bold letters.
- a digital whiteboard used for work purposes, this one is a little more bad design than anything. if you login with an @example.com email address every so often instead of dropping you to the workspace you were hoping to get, it drops you to a page showing teams of other people from example.com, and a modal asking you if you are interested in getting more from the tool. This is most annoying when it's a customer meeting and one or two of your team get lost in this way (the links to get from the team page to the board is non-obvious, and if it's your turn to get the redirect, logging out and back in does not work)
During one customer call it happened to the security SME got caught by the value redirect (it was a security discussion I was facilitating, the security SME was the star of the show), not realising my mic was on I loudly shouted CRAP!. That's when I realised this is CRAP, the modal begging me not to leave, the redirects to show extra value, its all CRAP - Customer Retention by Annoying Popup and I hate it.
You can use ublock origin to block the modals / pop-ups. I did it for a lot of websites.
It’s your responsibility to raise points, it’s your choice to accept that premise, swallow your spine and do it anyway.
Injury by spine swallowing is cumulative each one relatively harmless until it isn’t
The profit that Bezos has realized from Uyghur slave labor is part of the reason he was able to buy a half billion dollar yacht.
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/see-worthy-first-look-jeff-bez...
Source? That claim isn't supported anywhere in the geekwire article. It doesn't even talk about "labor", let alone "slave labor" or "Uyghur slave labor".
There’s plenty of sources documenting Amazon’s profits from Uyghur slave labor. Here’s one:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/news/apple-amazon-sony-samsung...
I suppose your claim that "profit that Bezos has realized from Uyghur slave labor is part of the reason he was able to buy a half billion dollar yacht" is technically true, but that's more due to weasel wording than anything else. The sentence gives an impression that one of the reasons why bezos could buy the yacht was because of Uighur labor, but strictly speaking the "profit" could be anywhere between one cent to half a billion dollars.
Factories in Guangzhou (where a lot of electronics have been made) have been using Uighur labor for a few decades now, though supposedly they are migrant workers and it’s all non-forced (which I would tend to believe, in the way that government arranged labor migrations are sort of dubious). If your trade school sets up an internship at a factory in another province, is it forced labor or not? This applies to Hans as much as it does to Uighurs, so the claims in the article come off as a bit strange.
Since I hated working there anyway, and had the financial freedom and job prospects to find other work I didn't hesitate to say "no, I will not do that", and he looked at me like I was a total asshole. But if I had been in a worse economy for programmers at the time, or hard up for money, I wouldn't have been able to make that choice so easily.
It is something that makes me very sad, especially since 99% of websites now have dark patterns similar to this. Most notable the modal popups that come up moments after a page loads and you have started to read it. I back out immediately whenever I can but obviously I am in the minority, this bullshit must "work" on some level to have become so ubiquitous.
Anyway if you should ever be asked to do a modal popup, and get fired for saying no, apply at Olo, we so far have never asked developers to do a dark pattern.